The Homemade Fireworks

1

The hit man my Aunt Laverta hired to kill her blind husband, Bill, turned out to be an undercover cop. She did five years in the Pine Bluff penitentiary.

An excerpt from a letter she wrote my Aunt Charlene from prison:

2

One time my Uncle Leon and I were picking haws for Christmas jelly, and I said, “I had this student from Memphis last semester in my freshman comp class. His name was Sylvester Peoples. Nice kid, personality plus. But he never could learn my last name. On his final essay, he put my name down as B.R. Wondervillage.”

Uncle Leon laughed. He said, “My preacher calls me Brother Derville Brown. Lot of folks have trouble with our name.” He stripped a twig of its haws. As they were pinging in his pan, he asked me, “Did you set Sylvester straight?”

“I showed him what he had written,” I said, “and told him it made my year. I asked if he was issuing a challenge to my whole life: Be our wondervillage.”

3

My late grandfather Herbert Edward Brownderville. Shards of biography.

Uncle Leon: “Daddy had them big old stovepipe arms. He would saw a tree down with a crosscut saw by himself, and then saw it up in lengths, and then he’d take a broadax and hew that thing out square, which is no easy task, and make it slick, too. He was so good with a broadax, he could do it—that’s an art. And then he’d pick that dude up and carry him out of the woods on his shoulder.”

Alton Ray Brownderville (my father): “Daddy was forty-five years old when I was born. He’d already had his teeth pulled by then and didn’t have the money for false teeth, so I never knew him with teeth. But he could eat meat and everything. He’d just gnaw a piece of meat off and gum it and swallow it down.”

Uncle Leon: “For three years when I was a little-bitty kid, me and Daddy and Mama lived in a tent. Daddy packed kerosene and ashes down as our floor—shiny gray like cement. I think the kerosene kept bugs away.”

Aunt Alta Mae (my father’s twin sister): “One evening, when it was getting to be dusky dark, Mama and Daddy and several of us kids was walking home from the cotton field, and it started hailing real bad. I saw one hailstone as big as a trailer hitch. We all sheltered in a thick fencerow and waited for it to pass. When we come out, the air was full of white feathers, and there was dead geese everywhere, scattered all over our forty. Daddy gathered up some in his pick sack for us to cook.”

Uncle John: “One morning I climbed away up high in the toothache tree, and I looked down and seen Daddy arranging and rearranging a stack of firewood to make it look just so. I never could figure out what he was up to.”

Aunt Charlene: “Daddy could strictly play down the glory. He rigged him up a homemade brace that set down over his shoulders and held the French harp up to his lips. That way, he kept his hands free so he could pick his guitar.”

Alton: “Daddy couldn’t afford good, thick socks or insulated boots, so on a cold fall night, he’d wrap his feet up in newspaper and put his knee boots on and go out scrapping, stripping bolls. Regularly cotton would bring thirty cents a pound, but after it was picked once and you were stripping bolls, you’d only get about ten cents a pound. It was a lot of work for a little of nothing, but he’d be out there with a pick sack late at night when water was standing in the rows and frozen to a solid sheet of ice.”

4

An excerpt from a prison letter from Aunt Laverta to Aunt Charlene—

Assimilation remix—

Kentucky fictioneer, my friend, old friend,

do you remember texting me

from Walmart last December?

“Out Christmas shopping,” you wrote,

“I have come to the conclusion that this country is

done for.”

I texted, “What do you see?”

“General malaise,” you answered.

“Gawking droolers jean-clad and florid.

Gaudy, fat wives

and aghast husbands clutching

scented candles.

Done for.”

As I received these magical tidings,

I was in the house

alone, per usual. I was standing before a

mirror, my face all santa-claused

with shaving cream. Razor to my neck.

How, I asked myself, does one

come through the holidays?

It takes a wondervillage. Which,

Sylvester Peoples notwithstanding, I am not.

The Christmas onslaught comes

again, and here we are, bud, one year closer

to our funerals, eschewing candlehood

and yet a little envious. You ask me,

“Does our work amount to anything?

What would our grandfathers think?”

You say you’re putting down your pen for good.

I used to go out there in winter as a boy

to love the quiet. To sit by the water

and warm my hands in a dog’s fur.

To see the accidental Christmas tree.

With only my dad between

me and Herbert Edward, I’ve had, most days,

an obscenely easy life.

If ever my nonexistent family should have to make

a bumpy winter trip by ghost horse and ghost buggy,

I will do like Herbert Edward: heat rocks

in the old box heater, wrap them

in gunnysacks, and set them

in the floorboard. That way, my playlike wife and kids

can warm their playlike feet.

The other night, my girlfriend and I drove out of town

to see her ninety-year-old aunt.

Blood-slush cold outside. Icy raindrops,

all that bling on the trees. Luckily, my car

has heat, even heated seats. The roads were slick silver,

but we made it. Once there, my girlfriend

mostly played with the pets. The aunt and I talked

for over an hour, and she was, in a word,

unimpressed. She told my girlfriend later,

“That so-called man of yours

sat right there in my living room and watched

the fire go out.” She paused—

let the outrage sink in. “And when we shook good-by,”

she summed me up, “his hands were soft as snow.”

I’m a walking white Christmas,

here in my obscenely easy life. But friend, old friend,

Kentucky fictioneer, the words you write

about your hurting hills

bring me closer

to Grandpa. They remind me what it takes, what

wrenching sacrifice, to keep

the new years coming

with their facile firework shows. You help me,

when I see those red sprays of light,

to remember Buck’s blood,

and in each pop like distant gunfire,

to hear a proud man saying please.

Herbert Edward asked your questions. I could read them

in his sad squint. He probably felt like a failure

when he scooped those red hot coals of fire,

placed them on the chopping block, and pounded

the holy Christmas out of them.

The pitifulness.